Author Archives: Ida Torres

The Lamp That Actually Looks Better With the Lights Off

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Most lighting has a dirty secret: it only works half the day. Flip the switch and a pendant or sconce can look spectacular, all warm glow and dramatic shadow. Flip it off, and you’re left staring at what is often just a glorified fixture, a thing bolted to a ceiling that has nothing to say for itself once the bulb goes dark. That gap between “on” and “off” is where a lot of home lighting quietly fails us, and it’s a problem most people never think to name because they’ve simply accepted it.

Hollis+Morris, the Toronto studio behind the new Beaufort collection, clearly has thought about it. Their solution isn’t a smarter bulb or a clever dimmer app. It’s a rethinking of what a light fixture is supposed to do when it’s doing nothing at all. Beaufort is built from sculpted solid wood paired with sandblasted acrylic, and the acrylic is cut and finished so it holds a kind of frozen depth, layered, translucent, a little mysterious, whether or not there’s current running through it. Turn it on and light diffuses through those layers in soft gradients. Turn it off and you still have an object worth walking past twice.

Designer: Hollis+Morris

The origin story is the kind of thing that sounds almost too tidy, except it happens to be true. Mischa Couvrette, the studio’s founder and lead designer, was flying home from Copenhagen’s 3daysofdesign when a conversation about ice, and about climate change, turned into sketches on a cocktail napkin somewhere over the Atlantic. By the time the plane landed, the collection basically existed in his head. The name comes from the Beaufort Sea, that remote stretch of Arctic water above Alaska and Canada’s Northwest Territories, which is a fitting reference for a studio that has built its identity on restraint rather than spectacle.

I appreciate that the collection doesn’t try to literally recreate an iceberg hanging from your ceiling. Instead it borrows the logic of ice: how light moves through something dense and layered, how clarity shifts depending on where you’re standing. The studio achieves that through repetition, mirroring, and rotation of a small set of core components, which is a fancy way of saying they’ve built one coherent visual language and then let it flex across a sconce, a mirrored horizontal pendant, a lantern-like vertical pendant, and a table lamp. Nothing in the lineup feels like an afterthought tacked onto a single hero piece just to pad out a catalog.

Jonathan Mandeville of Hollis+Morris put it plainly when he said the collection sits in a lineage of Scandinavian and Canadian design that values material honesty and quiet restraint, the idea that an object should earn its keep even when it isn’t doing anything. That’s a bit of a jab, gentle as it is, at a design moment that has leaned hard into maximalism and novelty for novelty’s sake. I don’t think Beaufort is arguing that bold, loud design is wrong. Plenty of homes need a little chaos. But there’s real value in a piece that doesn’t ask for your attention so much as reward it once you’ve already given it, and that’s a harder trick to pull off than another oversized statement chandelier.

It also matters, at least to me, that these pieces are made in Canada by a B Corp certified studio that treats that fact as a working value rather than a sticker on the box. Knowing who made a light and how isn’t a small thing anymore, especially with home goods, where supply chains can be murky at best.

Beaufort isn’t cheap. The R5 horizontal pendant runs $3,800 and the M2 horizontal starts around $1,900, so this is squarely in investment-piece territory, not an impulse buy from a big box store. But for anyone who has ever bought a light fixture, loved it while it was on, and felt a little let down by it during the day, Beaufort makes a fairly convincing case that the two states shouldn’t have to be so different.

The post The Lamp That Actually Looks Better With the Lights Off first appeared on Yanko Design.

IKEA Finally Made Buying Real Art Affordable

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I’ve walked out of gallery openings feeling like an intruder more times than I’d like to admit. The velvet rope isn’t always literal, but it might as well be. Original art has always come wrapped in a kind of hush money: pay enough, know the right people, or stay on the outside looking in. That gatekeeping is exactly what IKEA is going after with KONSTRUNDA, a new 22-piece collection that hands real, sculptural, gallery-worthy objects to anyone with an IKEA membership card and a normal paycheck.

The math tells the story better than I can. Emanuele Stamuli’s black-and-white ceramic vase starts around $19. Andu Masebo’s welded-frame glass side table tops out near $149. For context, a single studio ceramic piece from an independent artist can run you three or four times that before shipping. KONSTRUNDA isn’t imitation art or mass-produced décor pretending to have a point of view. It’s actual work from seven working artists and designers, priced like it was made for people instead of collectors.

Designers: Akanksha Deo, Andu Masebo, Emanuele Stamuli, Ingrid Leander, Igor Holtermann, Lisa Hilland, and Lisa Reiser for IKEA

What pulls me in is how differently each contributor answered the same open assignment. Lisa Reiser went mouth-blown glass, and her glossy black vessel does something genuinely strange: the surface seems to shift color depending on where you’re standing, like it’s reacting to the room rather than just sitting in it. The scale is domestic but the presence isn’t, which is a harder balance to land than it looks.

Lisa Hilland took pine, the most IKEA material there is, and carved it into a stool with a profile too intricate for something this affordable to have any business looking like. She also built an orange ceramic form around a deep arch, where the empty space matters as much as the clay around it. Negative space as a design decision at this price point is a confident move, and it pays off. The piece reads completely differently from across a room than it does up close, which is exactly what good ceramic work is supposed to do.

Akanksha Deo’s contribution hit me the hardest because it doesn’t try to look important. Her stacked wooden figures pull from traditional toys she grew up with in India, with a small mirrored cube tucked into the center of one. She calls the pieces “a family of imperfect characters,” and that phrase does a lot of work. The figures have a looseness to them, a slight awkwardness that makes them feel handmade even when they’re not. Art doesn’t have to loom over a room. Sometimes it just needs to keep you company.

Andu Masebo leaned the opposite direction. His glass tabletop sits inside a chunky welded chrome frame that refuses to apologize for its own bulk. The piece borrows furniture logic and pushes it into sculptural territory, sitting somewhere between a functional object and a statement. Stamuli’s ceramics operate in similar space, black-and-white graphic forms that feel more like drawings translated into clay than traditional pottery. Both designers are clearly interested in the line between art and utility, and the collection is better for having that tension in it.

Ingrid Leander and Igor Holtermann looked past the studio entirely and grabbed their references straight off the street: caution tape, zebra crossings, the visual noise of a city block, repurposed into cushions and oversized floor pillows. Leander’s textiles in particular are surprisingly sophisticated up close, the kind of graphic work that would look at home in a boutique hotel lobby but lands just as well draped over an apartment couch.

A painting behind glass, roped off and climate-controlled, asks nothing of you. A ceramic bowl on your own shelf, one you can actually pick up, gets folded into your daily life whether you meant it to or not. That shift from observation to ownership is what KONSTRUNDA is really selling, and seven designers managed to make it feel earned rather than convenient.

I’ll probably end up with the Deo mirrored figure on my own shelf before the year is out. Not because it’s a masterpiece. Because it’s mine, and for once, that didn’t cost me a mortgage payment.

The post IKEA Finally Made Buying Real Art Affordable first appeared on Yanko Design.

The $6 Scissors That Finally Fix the Sauce Packet Problem

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Anyone who has ever tried to open a foil pouch of curry sauce, ramen seasoning, or ketchup packet knows the specific frustration that follows. You tear at the corner, the packet resists, and then it either refuses to open at all or splits open too fast and sends its contents everywhere but the pan. Regular scissors cut the foil fine, but they do nothing for the part that actually matters, which is getting every last bit of sauce out without burning your fingers on a pouch that was just boiling in a pot of water.

That second problem is bigger than it sounds if you cook the way a lot of modern Japanese households do, where curry roux, miso paste, and ramen flavoring often come sealed in foil pouches meant to be heated directly in boiling water before you cut them open. You need something that can grab a hot pouch, slice it cleanly, and squeeze it dry, and no single kitchen tool has ever been built to do all three. Yaxell decided that was worth fixing, and the result is a pair of scissors that looks almost ordinary until you notice the blades aren’t blades in the way you’d expect.

Designer: Yaxell

The company split each blade into three distinct zones, and each one has a job. The tip is serrated and toothy, working less like a cutting edge and more like a set of tweezers, so you can lift a pouch straight out of boiling water without scalding your hand. The middle section has no sharp edge whatsoever. It exists purely to clamp down and squeeze, letting you press a sauce packet flat and coax out the last stubborn bit that usually ends up wasted at the bottom of the pouch. Only the small section near the handles actually cuts.

I like this kind of design because it starts from an honest observation rather than a marketing angle. Nobody sat down and asked how to reinvent scissors as a category. Someone just watched a person struggle with a hot, slippery, half-empty sauce packet often enough to realize the tool being used for the job was never built for it. That is a quieter kind of innovation than the splashy gadget launches we usually hear about, and it is also the kind that tends to actually stick around in a drawer for years instead of getting tried once and forgotten.

There is also something refreshingly modest about the price. Reports from Japan put the Squeeze Scissors at around 900 yen, which comes out to under six dollars. That is not a typo, and it is not a limited drop or a crowdfunded gadget that needs a hundred dollars and a leap of faith. It is a cheap, mass-produced kitchen tool that solves a problem most of us didn’t even realize we had accepted as normal. We just assumed sauce packets were supposed to be a little messy and a little wasteful, the same way we assumed shampoo bottles were supposed to leave a stubborn residue you can never fully get out.

What makes this feel worth paying attention to, beyond the kitchen itself, is what it says about how good design actually happens. It rarely comes from chasing a big, abstract idea. It comes from paying close attention to a small, specific annoyance and refusing to accept it as just the cost of doing things. A foil pouch of curry sauce is not a glamorous design brief, but it produced a tool with three separate functions built into one continuous blade, which is a more elegant solution than most of the “smart” kitchen gadgets that plug into an app and need charging.

I don’t think the Squeeze Scissors are going to show up on anyone’s list of the year’s most exciting product launches, and that is sort of the point. They are the kind of object that quietly earns a permanent spot in a kitchen drawer, gets used almost every day, and never asks for credit. That is a rarer achievement than it sounds, and it is exactly the kind of design story worth telling.

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Steel Pipe Stool That Never Uses a Single Weld or Screw

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I’ve seen a lot of stool designs that call themselves minimal and still hide a dozen fasteners under the seat. Yuval Meron’s Pipe Stool actually earns the word, and once you look closely at how the pieces meet each other, you start to appreciate it as a piece of design rather than just a fabrication trick.

The whole object reads as a single ribbon of steel that got folded, twisted, and locked into place. Look at where the seat cylinder meets the legs and you’ll notice small teardrop shaped holes and hook cutouts, cut with a laser before the metal was ever bent. Those cutouts aren’t decoration. They’re the joinery. One piece hooks through another and the tension of the bent steel holds everything tight, so the stool clicks together almost like a puzzle piece finding its slot. It’s a quiet bit of engineering that never announces itself, because from a few feet away it just looks like clean negative space.

Designer: Yuval Meron

The silhouette itself is what actually pulls me in. A rolled cylinder seat sits on top of two angled legs that splay out from a single central column, giving the whole thing a stance closer to a sawhorse or a gymnast’s pommel horse than a traditional four legged stool. That tripod like base means the stool never wobbles, even though it looks like it’s balancing on almost nothing. There’s something satisfying about a design that looks precarious and turns out to be the opposite.

Meron shows the Pipe Stool in a few finishes, and the variations tell you a lot about what this piece is trying to be. There’s a raw galvanized version, left with the mottled, slightly industrial sheen of unfinished steel, screws and seams visible on purpose rather than hidden away. Then there are the powder coated versions in navy and a deep red, which flatten the metal into a single confident color and make the stool feel more like a finished furniture object than a prototype. Seeing all three side by side, the raw metal, the navy, the red, makes clear this isn’t a one off art piece. It’s a system that can dress up or stay stripped down depending on where it needs to live.

The seat itself is the one part of the stool that isn’t steel. A padded cylindrical bolster, upholstered in a nubby woven fabric that echoes the tube shape underneath it, gets seated into the folded metal collar at the top. In the green version the fabric has almost a felted, sweater like texture, which is a smart contrast against all that cold, cut steel below it. It’s the kind of detail that makes you want to actually touch the thing before you sit on it, and honestly, that tension between soft seat and hard structure might be the most successful design decision in the whole piece.

What I appreciate most is that none of this needed extra parts to make it feel resolved. No visible bolts holding the seat to the base, no bracket doing quiet unglamorous work underneath. The hook and slot joints do the structural job, the powder coat or galvanized finish does the aesthetic job, and the upholstered bolster does the comfort job. Three problems, three simple solutions, no overlap.

I also like that Meron didn’t try to disguise the process. You can see exactly where the pipe was cut, exactly where it folds, exactly how one leg locks into the next. A lot of designers would sand that story away and pretend the object arrived whole. This one lets you read the making of it right there on the surface, which turns a stool into something closer to a diagram of its own construction.

It’s still a student project, and it may never make it past a handful of prototypes in a handful of colors. But it’s a genuinely good looking object regardless of where it ends up, one that manages to look sculptural and structural at the same time, and that’s a harder balance to strike than people give it credit for.

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Duolingo Actually Teaches Us How to Say These Luxury Brand Names

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I don’t really move in circles where this is a big deal, but there’s still a certain anxiety that creeps in when I need to say a fashion brand’s name out loud in public. A lot of these luxury labels are genuinely hard to pronounce correctly, and there are people who will judge you for getting it wrong (even though no one really should, right?). So most of us just… don’t say it. We point. We mumble. We change the subject.

Duolingo is no stranger to hilarious, meme-worthy campaigns, and for New York Fashion Week this year, they skipped their usual “learn a new language” messaging in favor of something a little more niche: teaching us how to actually talk about fashion. Enter The Phonetic Collection, a capsule collection created in partnership with designer Megan O’Cain, where every single piece is built around the phonetic spelling of a major fashion house’s name. The goal? Help ordinary people like me correctly pronounce the brand names we’ve been quietly avoiding for years.

Designer: Megan O’Cain for Duolingo

Duolingo isn’t exactly pivoting into the fashion industry, but they were surprisingly serious (well, semi-serious) about pulling off this NYFW campaign. O’Cain reworked classic tailoring, sportswear silhouettes, and accessories using her signature curved shapes and a moody monochrome palette, then layered the phonetic typography on top using embroidery, distressing, 3D printing, and even puff paint. Duolingo also released a 90-second runway-style video on YouTube showing off the full seven-piece capsule in motion, so you can see the pieces the way they were meant to be seen: strutting, not just sitting on a hanger.

As for the pieces themselves, they’re genuinely clever. There’s a lime-green purse (naturally, in Duolingo’s signature green) spelling out “air-MESS” to teach you how to say Hermès without wincing. There’s a jacket reading “zhee-vahn-SHEE” so you never have to fumble through Givenchy again. And thanks to a mustard-yellow piece from the collection, I now know that Jacquemus is pronounced “zhahk-MOOS,” which is information I did not have twenty-four hours ago and honestly feel a little more confident having. Other pieces in the seven-look capsule tackle names like Moschino (“moh-SKEE-noh”), Loewe (“loh-EH-vey”), and Comme des Garçons, proving this wasn’t a one-off gag but a full crash course stitched into clothing.

Beyond being a genuinely funny marketing gimmick, this is Duolingo’s way of joining the fashion conversation during one of the industry’s biggest weeks, all while staying true to the brand’s signature irreverent humor. It also quietly reinforces the company’s actual mission: helping people communicate more confidently, whether that’s in a foreign language or in the very specific dialect of high fashion. As Duolingo’s CMO put it, people often love a designer’s work but hesitate before ever saying the name out loud, and that hesitation is exactly the gap this collection was designed to close.

What I appreciate most about The Phonetic Collection is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously while still being weirdly useful. It’s the kind of campaign that gets people talking (pun fully intended) not because it’s trying to sell you a $2,000 handbag, but because it pokes fun at a very real, very relatable insecurity. Fashion has always had its own gatekept vocabulary, and most of us have just quietly accepted that we’ll never crack the code. Leave it to a language app with a slightly unhinged owl mascot to turn that insecurity into a punchline and a wardrobe at the same time.

Will I ever own a piece from this capsule? Probably not; it was largely available through a New York pop-up where fans could bid their Duolingo streak for a chance to take one home. But the next time I’m standing in a store and see a Jacquemus tag, I won’t just nod and change the subject. I’ll say it correctly, thank a green owl for the lesson, and maybe, just maybe, judge myself a little less for not knowing it sooner.

The post Duolingo Actually Teaches Us How to Say These Luxury Brand Names first appeared on Yanko Design.

3 Reasons Your Best Ideas Go Unrealized. Creativity Isn’t One of Them

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You know this moment. An idea hits you out of the blue, fully formed and when you least expect it. By the time you reach for your notebook and flip open the cover, it’s already gone. Even when you do capture the thought, the stark white pages of most notebooks can make every mark feel high stakes, while bound pages keep ideas locked in sequence instead of letting you compare them side by side.

I’ve lost more ideas this way than I’d like to admit, until I found the Ito Bindery x YD Drawing Pad. Made with Japanese craftsmanship, it also has no cover, so it stays open on my desk, ready anytime I want to jot down a to-do list or brainstorm some concepts. The softer tone of its grey paper makes it easy to start writing, and when I need to look back at brainstorming sessions, I tear out the pages and pin them on my wall.

Find out what removing one small barrier can do. The Ito Bindery x YD Drawing Pad is available now, starting at $35.

A Moment of Hesitation Is All It Takes.

What you capture in the moment and what you write down later are not the same thing. The former is instinctive. The latter is a reconstruction. Even a second of friction is enough to break the creative impulse, and a cover is friction.

Without a cover, there is no moment of deliberation before the pen meets the page. Ideas can flow onto the page as the mind produces them, continuously and without interruption. It also removes the easiest justification for delay – “I’ll write it down later’ becomes harder to reason with when the page is already open. This drawing pad has no cover, so there is no pause between the idea and the page.

Getting Rid of Blank Page Syndrome

Staring at a blank white page can be intimidating. The contrast makes anything you write feel final. So instead of drawing or writing freely, you start filtering and editing your thoughts. You wait for the idea to be more fleshed out before you commit it to paper.

With grey paper, the Ito Bindery x YD Drawing Pad’s neutral shade reduces the pressure of putting something imperfect on the page. Its softer color also reduces strain on the eye, allowing for longer and more focused creative sessions. For designers and artists, the grey paper also functions as a natural mid-tone medium to sketch on. Shadows are darker and highlights are brighter against it, which adds more dimension to your sketches.

Your Ideas Don’t Have to Stay Bound to the Page

In a bound notebook, your ideas exist in the order you wrote them down.You often find yourself flipping the pages back and forth to relate one idea to another. On the other hand, each sheet in this drawing pad is micro-perforated at the header, allowing it to tear away cleanly and become part of a growing record of your ideas. Over time, these accumulated pages are a tangible way to trace your thinking, revisit past ideas, and see how one thought leads to another.

For brainstorming sessions, visibility can change the way you work. Pin individual sheets to a wall or whiteboard to map out your ideas, connect different concepts, and see the bigger picture as it takes shape.

Refining Only What Is Essential.

The real cost isn’t any single idea. It’s all of them. The sketch that never started. The concept that didn’t survive the commute. The thought that felt important enough to remember but wasn’t captured in time to prove it.

The Ito Bindery x YD Drawing Pad was designed around this simple observation: ideas don’t fail to materialise because of a lack of vision. They go unrealized because something got in the way before you could act on them. What makes the Drawing Pad different is not what was added, but what was deliberately left out.

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Yinka Ilori Finally Told the Story of Chairs Nobody Wanted

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Every neighborhood has that curb. The one where a slightly wobbly dining chair or a stained armchair shows up on trash day, waiting for someone to either haul it to the dump or grab it before the truck does. Most of us walk past. We’ve been trained to see secondhand furniture as a problem to solve quickly, not a story worth keeping. That instinct, to discard first and ask questions never, is exactly what London-based designer Yinka Ilori has spent more than a decade pushing back against.

His new book, “Chairman,” published by ORO Editions, is the first to focus entirely on the furniture that made him famous: chairs he’s rescued from charity shops and street corners across London, then transformed with color, pattern, and a little bit of mischief. At 120 pages, it traces over ten years of work through what he calls vessels of memory, migration, and identity, three words that sound academic until you actually look at what he’s built. As Ilori puts it, chairs were his first design love because of the stories they carry, and that single line explains his career better than any curator’s essay could.

Designer: Yinka Ilori

I like that the book doesn’t pretend the chairs are just chairs. Ilori has said that vintage furniture holds “personal stories, secrets, emotions, and sentiments,” and in his British-Nigerian household, offering someone your chair was never a small gesture. It meant you were inviting them into your life, your gossip, your grief. That idea shows up again and again in his work, most memorably in his 2015 show “If Chairs Could Talk,” where he named restored pieces after childhood friends from his neighborhood, some who went on to do well, others who didn’t. The point wasn’t to rank them. It was to remind people that judging a chair, or a person, by its current condition tells you nothing about where it’s been.

That’s the part of Ilori’s practice I find genuinely refreshing in a design landscape that often treats furniture as either disposable or precious, with nothing in between. He’s neither flipping thrift store finds for profit nor placing them behind museum glass. He’s giving them jobs to do again, usually with a candle holder tucked into a backrest or a plant shelf built into an armrest, details that are playful without being gimmicky.

We have our own complicated relationship with secondhand furniture. We love a good flea market flip on television, but we also replace couches the way we replace phones, and curbside “free” piles rarely stay put for long before someone tosses them for good anyway. Ilori’s approach, sourcing directly from charity shops rather than manufacturing new pieces from scratch, quietly argues for a slower, more attached way of living with objects. He’s not lecturing anyone about sustainability. He’s just showing what happens when you actually look at a chair before deciding it’s garbage.

The book also situates his chair work inside a wider circle of artists and designers, which feels right, because Ilori has never worked in isolation the way some monograph subjects like to pretend they have. One section, drawn from his “There Is Good in All of Us” collection, makes that point almost too plainly, turning cast-off seating into small monuments to second chances. His path from upcycling furniture in 2011 to large public commissions, like the Colour Palace at Dulwich Picture Gallery or his Adidas collaboration, started with exactly this kind of hands-on, unglamorous restoration work. “Chairman” makes the case that the chairs weren’t a warm-up act before the bigger projects. They were always the main story.

What stays with me most is how simple the underlying belief actually is. Ilori isn’t claiming that every discarded object deserves a second act. He’s pointing out that most of them never get the chance to prove whether they do. Design so often chases what’s new, but “Chairman” quietly argues for paying attention to what’s already here, sitting in a corner somewhere, waiting for someone to notice it hasn’t finished its story yet.

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One Architect Quietly Ditched Rent for a 1sqm Treehouse Office

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Munich has some of the steepest commercial rents in Germany, and anyone who has tried to lease even a modest studio space knows the arithmetic rarely works in a small firm’s favor. Brokers, multi-year contracts, square footage priced by the centimeter. When the Munich architecture practice Opposite Office needed a new home base, founder Benedikt Hartl looked at those numbers and decided the smartest move wasn’t a smaller office or a coworking membership. It was no office at all, at least not the kind anyone pays rent on.

The result is Baumhaus Office, a roughly one-square-meter cube strapped to a tree on the campus of Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, built from spruce timber, plywood, and an aluminum shell that Hartl half-jokingly describes as “UFO-like.” A ladder gets you up to it. Inside, there’s shelving, a small desk, and fold-down panels that expand the workspace just enough to fit two or three people if everyone keeps their elbows in. A domed skylight sits overhead, so instead of staring at a drop ceiling, you get a view of the canopy. Two ratchet straps, cushioned with protective matting so the bark doesn’t suffer, hold the whole thing to the trunk. Hartl secured permission from the university’s president to install it there temporarily, and he’s designed it to come down just as easily and go up somewhere else.

Designer: Benedikt Hartl

His explanation for the whole exercise is refreshingly blunt. Rather than compete with Munich’s rental market, he moved the office out of it entirely and into the trees. He’s also put out an open call, only half-kidding, for anyone with a spare tree and a good view who doesn’t intend to charge him for it.

There’s an obvious punchline in a firm shrinking its footprint to one square meter, but the joke has a point buried in it. Opposite Office already works across borders on projects that rarely require a fixed headquarters, so the studio started asking why it needed a permanent lease at all. That question lands differently depending on where you’re reading this, but it lands. Downtown office towers in plenty of American cities have sat half empty for years now, landlords still pricing space as if 2019 never ended, and companies quietly deciding that a conference room and a Zoom link cover most of what used to require a floor plan. Baumhaus Office takes that same skepticism about commercial real estate and pushes it to its logical, slightly absurd conclusion. If the point of an office is a roof, a desk, and a door you can close, a tree does two of those things for free.

Opposite Office has framed the project as a nod to Cosimo, the boy in Italo Calvino’s “The Baron in the Trees” who abandons ground level entirely and never comes back down. I like that reference more than the usual sustainability talking points that get bolted onto projects like this. It’s not really about wood versus concrete. It’s about changing your vantage point on purpose, even briefly, to see whether the thing you assumed you needed was actually optional the whole time.

I’ll admit the practical side of me has questions. Winter in Thuringia is not gentle, and a plywood cube with a skylight is not insulation in any serious sense. But treating this as a permanent HQ misses the point Hartl is making. It’s a provocation with a ladder, built to prove that an architecture studio’s real asset is the people doing the thinking, not the address on the lease. Whether or not Baumhaus Office survives its first real storm, it’s already done its job: it made a very expensive problem look, for a moment, genuinely small.

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Pharrell Quietly Revives Adidas’ Weirdest Y2K Water Shoe for $140

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Summer never really wants to let go, and neither does my closet. Every September I face the same annoying puzzle: sandals feel done, sneakers feel too heavy, and nothing in between actually handles a wet dock, a muddy trail, and a sidewalk trip to the coffee shop without looking like safety equipment. That gap between “technical” and “wearable” has been a real problem in footwear for years, and it’s exactly the space Adidas and Pharrell Williams just walked into with the PW Water Moc.

The shoe is the third release under Pharrell’s ongoing Virginia label with Adidas, and unlike the Jellyfish or the Flat Earther before it, this one isn’t chasing runway drama. It’s pulling from something a lot more obscure: the Adidas Adventure Water Moc, a shoe most people forgot existed after the early 2000s. That’s the smart move here. Instead of inventing a new gorpcore silhouette from scratch, Pharrell dug up a shoe that was already built for exactly this problem, water to land, and gave it a reason to exist again.

Designer: Pharell x Adidas

Functionally, it actually holds up. The upper mixes breathable mesh with reflective webbing, and bungee-style laces get tucked under a wide strap so you’re not fumbling with knots every time you take it off at the door. The outsole is lifted from the 2005 Carnuba Adventure Moc, which means deep, aggressive lugs instead of the flat rubber most casual slip-ons get away with. It’s a shoe that seems genuinely fine with a creek crossing, not just a shoe that photographs well near one.

Where it gets interesting, and where I think Pharrell earns his credit, is the colorways. Adidas didn’t sand down the nostalgia to make it more palatable. The Lucid Ray Blue option comes with pink and seafoam accents that are unapologetically early-2000s, the kind of palette that would’ve looked at home on a Bratz commercial or a Limp Bizkit music video. There’s a black and silver pair for people who want the shape without the loud attitude, and a yellow colorway that splits the difference. None of them try to disguise where they came from.

I’ll admit I’m a little biased toward brands that actually go back to their own archive instead of just borrowing someone else’s aesthetic and calling it retro. Adidas has done this a few times now, quietly, and it tends to land better than the loud “vintage-inspired” drops that never point to an actual source. The Water Moc isn’t just Y2K flavored, it’s a real product from that era, rebuilt with better materials and a designer who clearly has affection for it rather than just using it as a trend hook.

At $140, it sits in a fair spot for a collaboration shoe with this much design history behind it. It’s not cheap, but it’s not asking you to pay Jellyfish-level hype pricing for something that’s essentially a reissue with upgrades. That price point also tells you who this shoe is actually for: people who want a functional water-ready shoe but refuse to wear something that looks like it belongs on a kayaking instructor.

What sneaker culture has been missing lately is a bit of goofiness that still functions. So much of the current outdoor-meets-fashion movement takes itself seriously, all muted colors and technical fabric with barely any personality. The Water Moc doesn’t ask to be taken that seriously, and that’s honestly refreshing. It’s a shoe that remembers being weird was part of the appeal the first time around.

Whether it becomes a genuine wardrobe staple or just a fun seasonal pickup probably depends on how much you already like the era it’s pulling from. But as a piece of design thinking, going back into the brand’s own closet instead of reinventing the wheel, it’s one of the more honest moves Adidas has made in a while. Sometimes the best new shoe isn’t new at all. It’s just finally getting its second summer.

The post Pharrell Quietly Revives Adidas’ Weirdest Y2K Water Shoe for $140 first appeared on Yanko Design.

Finally, One Tower Replaces Your Speaker, Lamp, and Wine Fridge

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Anyone who has tried to furnish a studio apartment knows the specific defeat of running out of surfaces before you run out of gadgets. The speaker needs an outlet and a shelf. The lamp needs its own corner. The mini fridge for wine wants counter space that doesn’t exist. Each object is fine on its own, but stacked together on a single console table, they start to look like a garage sale that lost an argument with a design magazine. That is the exact problem South Korean designer Jung Hyun Kim set out to solve with Babel, a concept he built for people who live in small rooms but refuse to shrink their idea of what home should feel like.

Kim designed Babel for a very specific and very real slice of the population, twenty somethings through mid thirties starting their independent lives in modest apartments, often around 500 to 550 square feet, the kind of footprint that is common from Seoul to Brooklyn to any first apartment in a city with real rent. His answer wasn’t to make each device smaller. It was to stop thinking about furniture and electronics as separate categories entirely, and instead build a single vertical column where every function gets its own segment, stacked like a totem instead of scattered like clutter.

Designer: Jung Hyun Kim

The tower reads almost like a figure standing in the room. At the top sits an eye shaped ambient lamp, its lens glowing warm and soft, the kind of light you’d want next to a couch at eleven at night. Below that, a red, fabric wrapped module houses the main speaker drivers, angled like a face with two eyes looking back at you, which is a genuinely clever piece of anthropomorphism for an object meant to live in your peripheral vision all day. The tapered midsection functions as the control hub, complete with a discreet volume display, and the whole thing terminates in a rounded black base that turns out to be a hidden drawer, a small cooling compartment for a couple of wine bottles. Four completely different jobs, one silhouette.

What makes this more than a novelty is the modularity built into the stacking logic. Nothing about Babel demands you use all four segments in one order. You can pull pieces apart, rearrange them, or run just the parts you need that week. A studio dweller might want the lamp and speaker without the bar module. Someone hosting more often might stack the drawer higher for easier reach. The design treats a small home the way a good capsule wardrobe treats a small closet, fewer pieces, each one doing more, none of them wasted.

I like that Babel doesn’t pretend the solution to small space living is owning less. It assumes you still want a good lamp, a good speaker, and a cold bottle of wine within reach, and it simply refuses to let those wants cost you three separate footprints. That feels more honest than most minimalist design advice, which tends to ask people to want less rather than design better. The name is a nice touch too, a nod to the biblical tower where many languages tried to reach the same point, which tracks neatly onto a product where lighting, sound, cooling, and control all speak different technical languages but rise from the same base.

Whether Babel ever becomes a shippable product is beside the point right now. It exists as a Behance concept, a portfolio piece from a designer who clearly thinks in systems rather than single objects, and that thinking is worth paying attention to regardless of manufacturing timelines. Apartment living isn’t getting more spacious anywhere, and the appetite for objects that look intentional rather than accumulated is only growing, especially among people who grew up curating every shelf for how it photographs. A stacked, sculptural answer to gadget clutter fits that mood perfectly.

Babel won’t fit every home, and a four function tower is a commitment, not an impulse buy. But as a piece of thinking about how to live well in less square footage, it’s one of the more clear headed ideas I’ve seen come out of a design program in a while. Sometimes the fix for too many objects isn’t fewer objects. It’s better posture.

The post Finally, One Tower Replaces Your Speaker, Lamp, and Wine Fridge first appeared on Yanko Design.